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ArguGPT: evaluating, understanding and identifying argumentative essays generated by GPT models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

AI generated content (AIGC) presents considerable challenge to educators around the world. Instructors need to be able to detect such text generated by large language models, either with the naked eye or with the help of some tools. There is also growing need to understand the lexical, syntactic and stylistic features of AIGC. To address these challenges in English language teaching, we first present ArguGPT, a balanced corpus of 4,038 argumentative essays generated by 7 GPT models in response to essay prompts from three sources: (1) in-class or homework exercises, (2) TOEFL and (3) GRE writing tasks. Machine-generated texts are paired with roughly equal number of human-written essays with three score levels matched in essay prompts. We then hire English instructors to distinguish machine essays from human ones. Results show that when first exposed to machine-generated essays, the instructors only have an accuracy of 61% in detecting them. But the number rises to 67% after one round of minimal self-training. Next, we perform linguistic analyses of these essays, which show that machines produce sentences with more complex syntactic structures while human essays tend to be lexically more complex. Finally, we test existing AIGC detectors and build our own detectors using SVMs and RoBERTa. Results suggest that a RoBERTa fine-tuned with the training set of ArguGPT achieves above 90% accuracy in both essay- and sentence-level classification. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive analysis of argumentative essays produced by generative large language models. Machine-authored essays in ArguGPT and our models will be made publicly available at https://github.com/huhailinguist/ArguGPT


Pre-Training for Robots: Offline RL Enables Learning New Tasks from a Handful of Trials

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Progress in deep learning highlights the tremendous potential of utilizing diverse robotic datasets for attaining effective generalization and makes it enticing to consider leveraging broad datasets for attaining robust generalization in robotic learning as well. However, in practice, we often want to learn a new skill in a new environment that is unlikely to be contained in the prior data. Therefore we ask: how can we leverage existing diverse offline datasets in combination with small amounts of task-specific data to solve new tasks, while still enjoying the generalization benefits of training on large amounts of data? In this paper, we demonstrate that end-to-end offline RL can be an effective approach for doing this, without the need for any representation learning or vision-based pre-training. We present pre-training for robots (PTR), a framework based on offline RL that attempts to effectively learn new tasks by combining pre-training on existing robotic datasets with rapid fine-tuning on a new task, with as few as 10 demonstrations. PTR utilizes an existing offline RL method, conservative Q-learning (CQL), but extends it to include several crucial design decisions that enable PTR to actually work and outperform a variety of prior methods. To our knowledge, PTR is the first RL method that succeeds at learning new tasks in a new domain on a real WidowX robot with as few as 10 task demonstrations, by effectively leveraging an existing dataset of diverse multi-task robot data collected in a variety of toy kitchens. We also demonstrate that PTR can enable effective autonomous fine-tuning and improvement in a handful of trials, without needing any demonstrations. An accompanying overview video can be found in the supplementary material and at thi URL: https://sites.google.com/view/ptr-final/


Graph Reinforcement Learning for Radio Resource Allocation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) for resource allocation has been investigated extensively owing to its ability of handling model-free and end-to-end problems. Yet the high training complexity of DRL hinders its practical use in dynamic wireless systems. To reduce the training cost, we resort to graph reinforcement learning for exploiting two kinds of relational priors inherent in many problems in wireless communications: topology information and permutation properties. To design graph reinforcement learning framework systematically for harnessing the two priors, we first conceive a method to transform state matrix into state graph, and then propose a general method for graph neural networks to satisfy desirable permutation properties. To demonstrate how to apply the proposed methods, we take deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) as an example for optimizing two representative resource allocation problems. One is predictive power allocation that minimizes the energy consumed for ensuring the quality-ofservice of each user that requests video streaming. The other is link scheduling that maximizes the sum-rate for device-to-device communications. Simulation results show that the graph DDPG algorithm converges much faster and needs much lower space complexity than existing DDPG algorithms to achieve the same learning performance. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been introduced to optimize a variety of resource allocation problems, thanks to its ability of learning wireless policies from the optimization problems without closed-form objectives and constraints, making decision in an end-to-end manner, and online training [1-8]. When learning a resource allocation policy to be operated in non-stationary wireless channels, a DRL algorithm needs to be online trained consistently for adapting to the dynamic environments. In particular, the agent of DRL interacts with the environment to gather a sample (i.e., an experience in reinforcement learning parlance) in each time step and updates deep neural networks (DNNs) with a batch of experiences every several time steps.


Randomized Block-Coordinate Optimistic Gradient Algorithms for Root-Finding Problems

arXiv.org Machine Learning

In this paper, we develop two new randomized block-coordinate optimistic gradient algorithms to approximate a solution of nonlinear equations in large-scale settings, which are called root-finding problems. Our first algorithm is non-accelerated with constant stepsizes, and achieves $\mathcal{O}(1/k)$ best-iterate convergence rate on $\mathbb{E}[ \Vert Gx^k\Vert^2]$ when the underlying operator $G$ is Lipschitz continuous and satisfies a weak Minty solution condition, where $\mathbb{E}[\cdot]$ is the expectation and $k$ is the iteration counter. Our second method is a new accelerated randomized block-coordinate optimistic gradient algorithm. We establish both $\mathcal{O}(1/k^2)$ and $o(1/k^2)$ last-iterate convergence rates on both $\mathbb{E}[ \Vert Gx^k\Vert^2]$ and $\mathbb{E}[ \Vert x^{k+1} - x^{k}\Vert^2]$ for this algorithm under the co-coerciveness of $G$. In addition, we prove that the iterate sequence $\{x^k\}$ converges to a solution almost surely, and $\Vert Gx^k\Vert^2$ attains a $o(1/k)$ almost sure convergence rate. Then, we apply our methods to a class of large-scale finite-sum inclusions, which covers prominent applications in machine learning, statistical learning, and network optimization, especially in federated learning. We obtain two new federated learning-type algorithms and their convergence rate guarantees for solving this problem class.


Chromebooks get a boost from Google. Will longer lifespan help users?

Los Angeles Times

Google's Chromebook has become ubiquitous in classrooms across the United States, often considered the go-to option for digital learning given its relative affordability and web-based programs -- a combination that proved even more valuable for distance learning during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since Chromebooks' launch more than a decade ago as a cheaper alternative to tablets, their use has expanded exponentially in schools nationwide, providing more students a personal computer device -- including in many low-income districts. And although issues of internet connection and at-home access to devices persist, new improvements to the Chromebook could help stretch its lifetime and scope. Google recently announced plans to expand Chromebooks' automatic updates up to 10 years, maximizing the potential lifespan of the devices that have become key for both in-school lessons and after-school studies. Beginning next year, the change will automatically apply to all Chromebooks launched in 2021 or later, and for devices released before 2021 there will be an option to extend the updates to 10 years from the platform's original release, Google officials said.


Will AI end education as we know it? Economist predicts schools, teachers could become 'obsolete'

FOX News

With the surge in growth of artificial intelligence, fears over the new technology have experts weighing in on what impact it will have on U.S. education. One economist warned that the technology will eventually lead to the elimination of teaching. "One of the jobs that is likely to be eliminated by A.I. is teaching," Euro Pacific Asset Management chief economist Peter Schiff told FOX News Digital. "I think certainly for elementary school education K through 12. I think at the end of the day, schools will be obsolete. Palm Beach Atlantic University professor of communication and Supper Honors Program director Dr. Tom St. Antoine argued, however, the technology presents educators with a "really good opportunity." IVY LEAGUE UNIVERSITY UNVEILS PLAN TO TEACH STUDENTS WITH AI CHATBOTS THIS FALL: 'EVOLUTION' OF'TRADITION' "In colleges and universities, we've been sort of obsessed with A.I. technology because for a lot of people, it poses little challenges like plagiarism and it sort of devalues the ability to do original work.


Computational Natural Philosophy: A Thread from Presocratics through Turing to ChatGPT

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Modern computational natural philosophy conceptualizes the universe in terms of information and computation, establishing a framework for the study of cognition and intelligence. Despite some critiques, this computational perspective has significantly influenced our understanding of the natural world, leading to the development of AI systems like ChatGPT based on deep neural networks. Advancements in this domain have been facilitated by interdisciplinary research, integrating knowledge from multiple fields to simulate complex systems. Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, represent this approach's capabilities, utilizing reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF). Current research initiatives aim to integrate neural networks with symbolic computing, introducing a new generation of hybrid computational models.


Pursuing Counterfactual Fairness via Sequential Autoencoder Across Domains

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recognizing the prevalence of domain shift as a common challenge in machine learning, various domain generalization (DG) techniques have been developed to enhance the performance of machine learning systems when dealing with out-of-distribution (OOD) data. Furthermore, in real-world scenarios, data distributions can gradually change across a sequence of sequential domains. While current methodologies primarily focus on improving model effectiveness within these new domains, they often overlook fairness issues throughout the learning process. In response, we introduce an innovative framework called Counterfactual Fairness-Aware Domain Generalization with Sequential Autoencoder (CDSAE). This approach effectively separates environmental information and sensitive attributes from the embedded representation of classification features. This concurrent separation not only greatly improves model generalization across diverse and unfamiliar domains but also effectively addresses challenges related to unfair classification. Our strategy is rooted in the principles of causal inference to tackle these dual issues. To examine the intricate relationship between semantic information, sensitive attributes, and environmental cues, we systematically categorize exogenous uncertainty factors into four latent variables: 1) semantic information influenced by sensitive attributes, 2) semantic information unaffected by sensitive attributes, 3) environmental cues influenced by sensitive attributes, and 4) environmental cues unaffected by sensitive attributes. By incorporating fairness regularization, we exclusively employ semantic information for classification purposes. Empirical validation on synthetic and real-world datasets substantiates the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating improved accuracy levels while ensuring the preservation of fairness in the evolving landscape of continuous domains.


Diffusion Augmentation for Sequential Recommendation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Sequential recommendation (SRS) has become the technical foundation in many applications recently, which aims to recommend the next item based on the user's historical interactions. However, sequential recommendation often faces the problem of data sparsity, which widely exists in recommender systems. Besides, most users only interact with a few items, but existing SRS models often underperform these users. Such a problem, named the long-tail user problem, is still to be resolved. Data augmentation is a distinct way to alleviate these two problems, but they often need fabricated training strategies or are hindered by poor-quality generated interactions. To address these problems, we propose a Diffusion Augmentation for Sequential Recommendation (DiffuASR) for a higher quality generation. The augmented dataset by DiffuASR can be used to train the sequential recommendation models directly, free from complex training procedures. To make the best of the generation ability of the diffusion model, we first propose a diffusion-based pseudo sequence generation framework to fill the gap between image and sequence generation. Then, a sequential U-Net is designed to adapt the diffusion noise prediction model U-Net to the discrete sequence generation task. At last, we develop two guide strategies to assimilate the preference between generated and origin sequences. To validate the proposed DiffuASR, we conduct extensive experiments on three real-world datasets with three sequential recommendation models. The experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of DiffuASR. As far as we know, DiffuASR is one pioneer that introduce the diffusion model to the recommendation.


H2O+: An Improved Framework for Hybrid Offline-and-Online RL with Dynamics Gaps

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Solving real-world complex tasks using reinforcement learning (RL) without high-fidelity simulation environments or large amounts of offline data can be quite challenging. Online RL agents trained in imperfect simulation environments can suffer from severe sim-to-real issues. Offline RL approaches although bypass the need for simulators, often pose demanding requirements on the size and quality of the offline datasets. The recently emerged hybrid offline-and-online RL provides an attractive framework that enables joint use of limited offline data and imperfect simulator for transferable policy learning. In this paper, we develop a new algorithm, called H2O+, which offers great flexibility to bridge various choices of offline and online learning methods, while also accounting for dynamics gaps between the real and simulation environment. Through extensive simulation and real-world robotics experiments, we demonstrate superior performance and flexibility over advanced cross-domain online and offline RL algorithms.